Microsoft brings new Start menu, taskbar experience to Beta channel Windows Insiders
Beta channel Insiders can check out the new, more transparent Start menu.
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Update, July 31 (1:30 pm ET): Microsoftreleased build 19042.423 (KB4568831)to Beta Insiders today, but it’s just a re-release of 19042.421 to bring it in line with the Windows 10 May 2020 servicing as of today.
What you need to know
Microsoft launched a newWindows 10preview build for Beta channel Insiders today, and it brings over several improvements to the Windows Shell that hit the Dev channel earlier this month. Most notably, this update includes a new Start menu design, notifications UI, and more. Today’s build comes in at version number 19042.421.
The new Start menu sports an overall cleaner look, giving Live Tiles a unified background that will match your system theme. Notifications also received a bit of a touch up, using the same layout that we’ve seen with Windows 10X. For new installations, you’ll also see a customized task bar layout depending on thing like whether your Android phone is linked to the PC, whether it’s a gaming PC, etcetera.
Here’s a look at everything that’s new in build 19042.421:
Theme-aware tiles in Start
We are freshening up the Start menu with a more streamlined design that removes the solid color backplates behind the logos in the apps list and applies a uniform, partially transparent background to the tiles. This design creates a beautiful stage for your apps, especially the Fluent Design icons for Office and Microsoft Edge, as well as the redesigned icons for built-in apps like Calculator, Mail, and Calendar that we started rolling out earlier this year.This refined Start design looks great in both dark and light theme, but if you’re looking for a splash of color, first make sure to turn on Windows dark theme and then toggle “Show accent color on the following surfaces” for “Start, taskbar, and action center” under Settings > Personalization > Color to elegantly apply your accent color to the Start frame and tiles.
ALT + TAB between apps and sites
Are you a multitasker? With this build, your tabs open in Microsoft Edge will start appearing in Alt + TAB, not just the active one in each browser window. We’re making this change so you can quickly get back to whatever you were doing—wherever you were doing it.If you’d prefer fewer tabs or the classic Alt + TAB experience, we’ve added some settings for you under Settings > System > Multitasking. You can configure Alt + Tab to only show your last three or five tabs or choose to turn this feature off completely.This feature requires a Canary or Dev build of Microsoft Edge (version 83.0.475.0 or higher).
Improving pinned sites in Microsoft Edge
We have another new feature we’ve been working on to make you more efficient when browsing the web: quick access to tabs for your pinned sites. Clicking a pinned site on the Taskbar will now show you all of the open tabs for that site across any of your Microsoft Edge windows, just like you’d expect for any app with multiple open windows.This feature requires Microsoft Edge Insider Build 85.0.561.0 or higher (Canary or Dev Channel).NOTE: Since this is an early preview, existing sites on your Taskbar will not experience this new behavior until you remove and re-pin them.
A more personalized Taskbar for new users
We want to help customers get the most out of their PCs from day one, and that starts with offering a cleaner, more personalized, out-of-box experience to give you the content you want and less clutter. This provides us with a flexible, cloud-driven infrastructure to test customer reception of default Taskbar content and tailor these layouts based on user and device signal.
We will evaluate the performance of individual default properties, monitoring diagnostic data and user feedback to assess an audience’s reception. Using this information, we will tune default layouts to minimize clutter and perceptions of bloatware.
Improving the notification experience
We are making some changes to improve the notifications experience in Windows 10.First, know where your toast is coming from by checking out the app logo at the top. Done with the notification? Select the X on the top right corner to quickly dismiss and move on with your life.
And second, we are turning off the Focus Assist notification and summary toast by default, so we will no longer let users know that Focus Assist has been turned on through an automatic rule via a notification. This can be changed back to the previous behavior via Settings.
Making Settings even better
We’re continuing to work on bringing capabilities from Control Panel forward into Settings. As part of this ongoing effort, we are migrating information found in Control Panel’s System page into the Settings About page under Settings > System > About. Links that would open the System page in Control Panel will now direct you to About in Settings. We are also bringing new improvements like making your device information copyable and streamlining the security information shown. And don’t worry—if you’re looking for more advanced controls that lived in the System page in Control Panel, you can still get to them from the modern About page if you need them!
Improving the tablet experience for 2-in-1 devices
Previously, when detaching the keyboard on a 2-in-1 device, a notification toast would appear asking if you wanted to switch into tablet mode. If you selected yes, you would switch into tablet mode. If you chose no, it would give you the new tablet posture experience introduced in the May 2020 Update (or simply the desktop on earlier versions of Windows 10). We are further updating this experience by changing the default, so that this notification toast no longer appears and instead will switch you directly into the new tablet experience, with some improvements for touch. You can change this setting by going to Settings > System > Tablet. Some users may have already seen this change on Surface devices.And to address confusion with some users getting stuck in tablet mode on non-touch devices, we are removing the tablet mode quick action on non-touch devices.In addition, new logic is incorporated to let users boot into the appropriate mode according to the mode they were last in and whether the keyboard is attached or not.
Changes, improvements, and fixes
For more on this build, you can check out Microsoft’sfull release notes. Otherwise, Beta channel Insiders can download the build now via Windows Update.
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Dan Thorp-Lancaster is the former Editor-in-Chief of Windows Central. He began working with Windows Central, Android Central, and iMore as a news writer in 2014 and is obsessed with tech of all sorts. You can follow Dan on Twitter@DthorpLand Instagram@heyitsdtl.
